Interview with Neale Williams (Climax Studios)Date published: 2013.12.08 Can you please tell us your part in the development of Silent Hill? I was Lead Artist on both Silent Hill Origins and Silent Hill Shattered Memories. What were your visual inspirations for this new take on Silent Hill? Obviously we were very familiar with the Silent Hill universe having previously created Origins- I was a big fan of the first 2 titles in the series long before I had the opportunity to work on it- but whilst we took certain inspiration from elements of the previous titles in the series, we very much wanted to ensure that Shattered Memories wasn’t another slavish homage to them. I personally tend to draw a lot of influence from traditional cinema, photography and art media. As well as the expected Horror/J-Horror/ Psychological Thriller points of reference, I found inspiration from such sources as (to name a few) Alain Resnais, Darren Aronofsky, David Cronenberg, Lars Von Triers, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Edward hopper, Eric Fischl, Ken Currie, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Bacon, Marc Quinn, Zdzislaw Beksinski, Francesca Woodman, Andre Serrano, Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Dave McKean, Joel Peter Witkin- work that demonstrated strong use of colour and light, isolation or featured a strong element of dark surrealism. Hopper was particularly relevant, both for his fantastic use of colour, light and shadow and his poignant depictions of isolation and slowly deteriorating relationships. Characterisation in SHSM was called out as being particularly strong – how would you account for this? In Origins we had explored some of these characters in their previously established roles, so the chance to take them and re-imagine them in the context of Shattered Memories was something that we were certainly looking forward to, and overall I am still proud of what we achieved in this respect; it’s always a risk whilst they all retain elements of their previous incarnations, they are very much Shattered Memories characters and belong completely to that story. We spent a lot of time developing concept art, and had a talented team of character artists who invested a lot of effort in creating them. We also spent time creating bespoke shaders so that characters hair, for example, rendered nicely. It was also important that the personality’s of the different versions of each character was clearly evident in both their appearance and their mannerisms, which helped craft a richer and more rewarding experience for the player. One of the main things we wanted to achieve was for our characters to seem “human”, that they had real personalities- something that SH2 in particular excelled at. There is an intangible element that separates the usual homogonous CGI automatons from a character that genuinely feels like an authentic person, a level of nuance and idiosyncrasy that is often missing, which we wanted to ensure was present in ours. Once the initial characters were created, we spent quite a lot of time refining their appearance, subtly tweaking anything that didn’t look quite right and paying a lot of attention to areas such as facial animation, trying to find a balance where the characters felt like real people, but exhibited an otherworldliness, a dream-like element to their personalities that ensured that the viewer was never entirely sure of what was real and what wasn’t. Of course, the one thing that is make-or-break for producing a strong, interesting, believable character is the quality of the dialogue and the VO- as soon as they start rolling out stilted clichés with awkward pauses and inflections then the viewer knows that they are not real- this has always been a huge problem with narrative-based game experiences, and continues to be so today; fortunately we had a great story told through convincing dialogue and fantastic delivery, and that combined with the artwork itself really brought the cast to life; even now, I think that they are great characters. With such bold changes to an already established IP what from your perspective were the most challenging aspects of the development? We felt that the series had increasingly become a “by numbers” exercise, a slave to the ground breaking of its early incarnations- Origins, an enjoyable SH game and certainly something that I am still quite proud of, is perhaps an example of this box-ticking process (although by no means the only one). With Shattered Memories, we were re-inventing the original SH story (although there are plenty of references to the original SH for those who know where to look) for a brand new platform, so this presented a unique opportunity to take what we believed were the core elements of a Silent Hill game and at the same time break away from the preconceptions that had shackled us on the previous title. The overarching narrative themes played a key role in the visuals as well- as well as incorporating all of the visual elements that were used to help build your psych profile, many locations had varying colour schema and elements based upon your personality profile. We used recurring visual cues and metaphors providing a rich backdrop that ambiently reinforced the main themes of the narrative- sometimes literal references, for examples props directly to ice and cold, direct references to family and bereavement/loss, sometimes more abstractly suggestive and evocative; everything in the game world meant something. The “noise” effect that was a staple of the series took the form in SM of a corrupted VHS video recording, again tying directly in with one of the key recurring elements of the narrative, echoing both the opening scene in the game, where the viewer sees someone constantly re-watching the same video clip, and the finale. The “VHS” aesthetic was also one that we used in the user interface and menus, trying to maintain as consistent and immersive an experience as possible. This was also the case with one of the more controversial decisions we made, which was to replace the familiar “rusty metal” otherworld of previous Silent Hill titles with a completely different aesthetic. We had touched on this in Origins, where each of the locations had a subtle variation reflecting different themes but overall still adhered to the established style. On Shattered Memories it was not only important to us that the otherworld had it’s own unique identity rather than just aping what had been done so many times before, but also that, once again, it directly supported one of the fundamental elements of the narrative; a decaying and increasingly abstracted world encased in a protective shell of impenetrable ice as direct metaphor for the protagonists desperate attempts to keep the last vestiges of their fading fragile memories intact. How did you turn out at the end of game and which Police Officer did you meet? It’s funny, even though I knew how everything worked and sometimes tried to deliberately “skew” it, during a full play-through the game still read me pretty accurately- I usually ended up with the “Drunk Dad” ending and “Authoritarian” Cybil… |